Develop a safer ground piercing method/process for fiber to the home installation

Cable strike is one of the safety challenges that construction industry’s utilities sector is facing. Such incidents can cause injury and death for operators, as well as costly repairs and compensations. Fiber4all, a Dutch company which is responsible for Fiber-to-the-Home (FttH) connection is suffering from the same problem. Despite specialized equipment, work preparation and process organization cable strikes still occur. Even though the number of such incidents in comparison to the total number of the connections is very low, stakeholders want to avoid such incidents as much as possible. An exploratory study was carried out based on the incidents’ reports from January 2013 till March 2015. Our findings in this study indicate that the majority of cable strikes are associated with human errors and incorrect information in FttH installation. Apart from exploratory study, an investigation was accomplished through six interviews with operators within the FttH work environments. From operators' perspective and their experiences of incident occurrence a taxonomy of the causal factors of cable strikes was constructed. This study suggests to investigate and invest more attention into the human aspect of the system despite the initial understanding, which was more focusing on technology improvements.